Both translation and terminology can benefit from English for specific purposes and corpus linguistics in the study of the process of extracting information from texts, in particular, medical abstracts complying with the IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussions) format. This study focuses on verbs as instruments of conceptual, textual and rhetorical activation in scientific discourse and investigates the relation between the distribution of verbs, the different rhetorical moves of abstracts and the activation of conceptual areas. To that end, we propose a semantic classification of the most frequent verbs in each rhetorical section and in abstracts as a whole, and apply a method for the extraction of conceptual, textual and rhetorical information based on the analysis of a POS-tagged corpus within the framework of corpus linguistics and the Functional-Lexematic Model.